It's a Wilder Ride
by SCWLC
Summary: You can meet the most interesting people in the Cretaceous.


Title: It's a Wilder Ride  
Author: SCWLC  
Disclaimer: I don't own Primeval, I don't own anything owned by Scholastic or PBS and I certainly don't own Lily Tomlin (who totally earned that Daytime Emmy).  
Rating: G  
Summary: You can meet the most interesting people in the Cretaceous.  
Notes: I'm going to try to surprise someone with this crossover, (I mean, if I didn't give it away with the disclaimer) but I've been on a bit of a binge for this TV show, and I couldn't help but imagine Connor, Abby and Danny getting home this way.

* * *

Months they'd been trapped in the Cretaceous, and Connor was hard-pressed to keep optimistic they'd get home. Mostly he did it because it kept Abby's spirits up when he pretended to be a gormless idiot too stupid to realise that this far along there was almost no chance of either rescue or home-bound anomaly, but he did it anyhow.

It was such hard work living that far from civilisation that Connor was sometimes amazed at how it was possible that humanity had ever managed to scrape itself out of caveman living and into the modern era.

They'd had to leave their previous temporary home again, having been evicted by a pack of raptors, so they were trying to find somewhere that a raptor wouldn't try to get into. That was when Connor began to feel distinctly baffled. Because he could have sworn he was hearing laughter and the sounds of children. Next to him, Abby stiffened. "Do you hear that?" she asked.

"An anomaly next to a primary school?" he suggested.

They exchanged a grim look and hurried along until they came around an enormous old cycad to see . . . an animal-patterned yellow school bus, an American one by the location of the steering wheel inside, a bunch of children pointing out things to a far-too-calm woman in a weird dress with what looked like an evolution theme on it, weirder glowing earrings that might have been birds and frizzy red hair. "An excellent observation, Tim!" she was saying cheerfully to a black boy with a large sketch pad.

"So, does that mean that dinosaurs . . . evolved into birds?" said a chubby boy in green with a red cap.

"Precisely, Ralphie," said the woman.

"Well, then that explains why the dinosaurs went extinct," a Hispanic boy said. "They didn't spend enough on stuff because they were cheep! Get it?"

"Carlos!" chorused the class. It seemed to be habit for them.

Connor snickered despite his confusion. Abby elbowed him.

An Asian girl came hurtling back, screaming, accompanied by a redheaded boy. "Ms Frizzle! Ms Frizzle! Those dinosaurs just stole our sample bag!"

"I knew I should have stayed home today," moaned the redheaded boy.

"Oh, bad, oh bad, oh bad bad bad," said a black girl.

The woman grinned. "Then we'll just have to catch up with them. To the bus!" she shouted.

Before Connor and Abby's stunned eyes the children sanguinely climbed aboard and then the bus . . . leapt into the air for lack of a better term, spun rapidly around like a fairground ride, seemed to stretch and compress, and then . . . turned . . . into . . . a . . . schoolbus-jeep hybrid before trundling off into the brush.

"Were . . ." Connor started and tried again. "Abby, do you think the thing we ate last night might've been hallucinogenic?"

"Did you just see a bus jump, spin around and morph into a ten-seat jeep?" Abby asked him.

"So, it's not just me," Connor said. They exchanged looks and went racing after the bus just in time to see it perform its little dance again and literally turn into a parasaurolophus. "What the hell?" It was a distinctly schoolbus-like duckbill, but it was definitely a duckbill. And it was making a beeline for a member of a herd of parasaurolophuses that was carrying a plastic baggie full of some sort of vegetation.

After the bus had wrestled the bag away and taken off, Connor and Abby forgot entirely about finding a new living space, because this was just . . . "Do you suppose they're aliens?" Abby offered, staring at this apparition before them.

"I don't . . . American aliens?" Connor said as the boy in the green t-shirt started going on about baseball and a game he wanted to get back home to see.

A blonde girl whipped out a book then, saying, "According to my research, a massive asteroid was the reason the dinosaurs went extinct."

"But if it was a giant asteroid," objected the black girl, "Then how come it didn't kill everything?"

"Yeah," added the redheaded boy, "And one rock couldn't squash everything on Earth, it would only hit one side of the planet."

The woman, Ms Frizzle, said, "Keen questions, Keisha, Arnold, anyone have any ideas?"

If there was a better cue to crash this insane little school trip, Connor didn't know what was. "Since the usual theory about the K-T boundary is that the landing of the asteroid caused it to throw up a bunch of ash and stuff in the air, it's more about the sun being blotted out and the only things that made it through were the ones that could adapt to the cold and the like."

The kids all turned to stare, but none of them seemed more than mildly surprised to see him and Abby. "So, if there was no sun, then the plants would have died," the black boy, Tim, said.

The Asian girl picked up his train of thought, "Then the animals that eat plants would have died."

"And the animals that eat other animals wouldn't have had any food," continued Keisha.

"Making the whole food web collapse!" finished Carlos.

Ms Frizzle beamed. "I have such clever students!" she exclaimed.

"How did you get here?" Abby asked.

"The schoolbus," said Arnold, the redheaded boy.

"Arnold," the Asian girl hissed reprovingly.

He glared at her. "What, Wanda? They've got to have a magic schoolbus or something of their own, or they wouldn't be here. I mean, unless Ms Frizzle's wrong about people being around at the same time as dinosaurs."

"The schoolbus," Abby repeated blankly.

Connor glanced at Abby, she nodded, and he turned back and said, "Since . . . erm . . . our . . . transport is . . . gone, I don't suppose you could give us a lift to the spring of 2009?"

Ms Frizzle looked them over briefly, then said, "I think we can manage that, but we have to finish the field trip first."

Abby looked at Connor, shrugged, then said, "Sure."

"Fantastic!" said Ms Frizzle. "All aboard! Single file, please!"

"At my old school, we didn't pick people up in the middle of field trips," the brunette girl said, with an air of oft-repeated attempts to remind people of what the normal world was like.

Sitting down at the back, Connor and Abby clipped on the seatbelts along with the children when Ms Frizzle declared, "Seatbelts, everyone!" Then she patted the lizard that had climbed onto her to curl around her neck. "Come on bus, do your stuff!"

Before Connor and Abby's stunned eyes, buttons on the massive dashboard of the bus were pressed, and the world outside the bus windows was on fast forward, showing years pass, the comet that obliterated the dinosaurs hurtling through the sky above them, followed by the massive explosion from the crash, a wave of fire sweeping over the bus, something which seemed to bother none of the children in the least, while Connor and Abby cringed from the nuclear-grade forces sweeping past. "You get used to it," Arnold told them in long-suffering tones. "The Frizz'll turn anything into a field trip."

"Yeah, remember that time we got baked into a cake?" asked Carlos.

"That was your fault, Carlos," the blonde girl said tartly. "And I didn't appreciate being left to distract Ms Frizzle on my own."

"Come on, Dorothy-Anne," wheedled Carlos, "It wasn't that bad."

"Humph," she said and turned to what seemed to be a bottomless bag of books.

"Class," said Ms Frizzle, "We are now entering the Cenozoic period. More specifically, the Paleocene. We are now entering the Age of Mammals."

The whole class tumbled out of the bus, and Connor and Abby followed, bemused. The children seemed to think this was entirely normal, and Connor decided to go along with it, offering up free commentary to any of the children who asked. Abby chose to glue herself to Ms Frizzle's shockingly active lizard, Liz, and crooned happily to her about Rex and her iguana.

One of the kids made an offhand comment about getting a closer look at the terror birds running along in the distance, and suddenly the teacher shouted, "Hit it, Liz!"

The lizard scampered into the bus, and a moment later a laser ray gun of some kind popped out of the roof and transformed them all into a motley collection of titanis. "Wha'?" Connor said, sorting out his suddenly weirdly long legs.

"Cool!" exclaimed Wanda. "Look how fast I can run now!"

"We can talk?" Abby asked. Connor had the sudden urge to preen her, ignoring the annoying chicks all around them, but the birdified teacher just shouted at them to keep up, and they got swept along.

Which was about when they saw the terror birds closing in on something. Someone, rather. "Danny!" Connor exclaimed, and shouldered his way through the flock chasing their friend. Abby followed, judiciously snapping at any bird that got in their way. When they got close, Danny took a swing at them with what looked like a long, bleached bone. "Danny! It's us!"

Danny tripped, stumbled, rolled, kept running, and mumbled something about not going mad.

Abby ducked another swing from Danny's weapon, got her beak into the seat of his trousers and threw him onto Connor's back. "This way!" shouted Tim.

They turned, running away from the very angry pack of . . . other terror birds . . . this was so weird . . . and rejoined the kids at the bus in time to get changed back into people. "What in the . . ." Danny was speechless for the first time Connor had ever seen him.

"Hey, Danny, would you mind getting off," Connor said.

"What?" Danny repeated as he did so.

Ms Frizzle shot them a sharp look. "You have many more friends who got lost?"

Connor shook his head. "Danny's the last one."

Danny followed them onto the bus, as bemused as Connor and Abby, and they watched the ice age come in, saw the children play with mammoths and get chased by a smilodon, then watched the ice age recede, a town spring up around them until finally they were back in a primary school parking lot. "Thanks for the lift," Danny was saying while Connor and Abby wrestled with making a call overseas on the phone in the children's classroom.

"You've reached James Lester," said a blessedly familiar voice.

"Lester?" Connor said. "We sort of need a lift home."

"Connor?" Lester sounded stunned. A distant chorus of voices in the background indicated that Sarah, Becker and some others from the ARC were listening in to the call. "Where are you?"

Connor looked over at Abby. "Where are we, anyhow?"

"Walkerville Elementary," put Arnold in, helpfully. "We live in Walkerville." At Connor's blank look, he added, "In Oregon."

"Right. Walkerville, Oregon," he told Lester.

"What the devil are you doing in America?" asked their peerless bureaucratic leader.

Connor glanced at the ordinary-looking classroom, the eccentric teacher with her pet lizard that Abby was fawning over and Danny's amused perplexity over some dramatic tale involving a fictional character named Weather Man, or possibly something to do with the town's water supply, and decided that the better part of valour was discretion in this case. "It's just where we all got spit out," he said. "And since we don't have any money and no explanation of how we wound up here, I'd sort of like to avoid going through customs, yeah?"

"Right," Lester said. "Becker will be there as soon as possible."

"Great," Connor told him.

They had a shower, cleaned up, heard a confused tumble of stories about previous school trips (the children seemed to be rather desperate for someone to tell about these madcap trips) and eventually found themselves waiting on the outskirts of town for the transport that would take them all home to London. "What are we going to tell Lester?" Abby finally asked.

"That we found an anomaly that caught us up to Danny, then another one that landed us here," Connor said firmly. "You think he'll believe the time-travelling schoolbus story?"

"Good point," Danny said. "Still, that woman's a pistol."

"Sort of terrifying," Connor retorted.

Abby mused, "I like Liz."

Connor nodded. "Liz is pretty cool."

When Becker arrived, they stuck to their story. There were some things, after all, that had to be seen to be believed.

* * *

Yes. This is a Magic School Bus crossover. No. I'm really not adding to it. Yes, I love this show and was inspired by the Busasaurus episode. Also, yes, I messed with the timelines, because the original series is from the mid-90s. Finally, they never specify the state, so I picked one. Because even though there are alligators in one episode, let's be honest, I wouldn't put it past the Frizz to make it from New York to Florida in a ten-minute drive.


End file.
